Wonky distortion in video - what's happening and how do I stop it?

What's causing this distortion in the video?

Everything else looks fine, but sometimes my skin tone goes funky and chunky.  

What's this distortion called so I can look up how to fix it?

It looks too me like an overexposure. Try shooting a bit darker and enabling dynamic range compression in the camera.

I don't know how to do dynamic range for a video.  Is there a trick?

It looks like only one colour is over-exposed, but the way it moves in the video are a bit weird.  It's not something I've seen before.  The other colours in the shots are exactly what I'm wanting, but it's just that orange that's acting weird.

It's only in a few clips.
But it doesn't seem to be in every clip from the same footage.  It's like the colour correction was applied wrong somehow to a handfull of clips.

I'm going to try resetting and reapplying the colour correction to see if it's something to do with the settings or a fault in way the computer applied it.  

My computer is struggling with this file and I wonder if these are the 6 clips where it crashed while applying the colour correction.  

Sebastian's suggestion is a good one and will help preserve detail in the white wool in your hand as well. But also bear in mind that online video sites like YouTube will convert your video to one or more alternative formats, which will result in generation loss similar to that in your example.

The specific issue looks like macro blocking. https://www.avsforum.com/threads/macro-blocking.692624/ Essentially, the video has been over-compressed (either at the source, or by YouTube, or both). Try increasing the resolution and the quality settings (bitrate) on your camera to ensure that the original contains as much detail as possible. It may not make much difference, but you don't have a lot of control once it is uploaded to YouTube.

YouTube and other services also adjust the quality of the video based on the speed of your internet connection, to avoid buffering slowdowns and pauses. Your connection may be a little slow for the resolution you have selected. Try selecting a lower resolution using the gear icon in the lower right and see if that helps. Or try loading the video using a faster connection. Also, cellular providers are notorious for re-compressing high resolution video to conserve bandwidth on their networks. If you are using cellular data to watch video, this is likely to exacerbate the problem.

Aaron
Sig under construction

Here's what it looks like out of camera - somewhere close to where I cut the earlier example.

So I don't feel the issue is with the camera.  It's on the highest settings, except I'm doing 30-ish fps instead of 60 since I'm not slowing down the footage and 60fps is taking up too much memory.

I'm using Filmora X because that is what my computer can handle


I look at the editor (before the file is translated into youtube-able format)

It's there.

So something between the camera and before it is exported.

That helps.

R, I looked at the EOS M5 manual and can't find a setting for this. However setting "picture style" to "portrait" could help.

It looks to me like one channel (probably red?) is reaching the maximum and the camera can't figure out what color it is anymore. Using a lower exposure should deal with that at the cost of a darker image. Since your camera does not record the raw film data, but a compressed version, boosting the brightness in post isn't really an option as the data just isn't there. It needs to happen in camera during the video encoding.
It being: increase the brightness of the images and compressing bright colors. I think the "picture style" option allows this, but only via the software.
And it does not run on linux, so I can't test it.

https://my.canon/en/support/0200588703

Yep it’s definitely not overexposure but some problem with the export and compression. Im not familiar with filmora but maybe you could share a screenshot of your export settings?

Ah great. So I tried to solve the wrong problem.

But part of the issue remains the same: Once the camera has encoded the raw data into a compressed video format, there is almost no extra data remaining to make changes to brightness/colors/contrast. (I think we discussed that problem in another thread for images.)
So you have to get all your style settings right in the camera and resist the urge to "fix" it later.

If the re-encoding is the problem (which is also very slow), you can try an editor that does not re-encode the video.

This is one of them: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Sebastian Köln wrote:R, I looked at the EOS M5 manual and can't find a setting for this. However setting "picture style" to "portrait" could help.

It looks to me like one channel (probably red?) is reaching the maximum and the camera can't figure out what color it is anymore. Using a lower exposure should deal with that at the cost of a darker image. Since your camera does not record the raw film data, but a compressed version, boosting the brightness in post isn't really an option as the data just isn't there. It needs to happen in camera during the video encoding.
It being: increase the brightness of the images and compressing bright colors. I think the "picture style" option allows this, but only via the software.
And it does not run on linux, so I can't test it.

https://my.canon/en/support/0200588703

I don't like that colour profile.  I usually stick with the more natural Canon colour profile as I can bring out the elements I want in post production.  

I can see the file out of camera isn't the problem.  It's something in the editing or post-editing process.  

Since I can see the disruption before I export the file - the error must be somewhere in the editing.  

The histogram has the reds blown.  

Which is strange because I applied the same colour correction for all the clips, and even clips from the same ... what do you call it, single recorded file... are acting differently.  Some have this weird glitch and some do not.  

here is the histogram before the colour correction is applied

the distortion isn't there.

So it's something in how the colour correction is working that's causing the issue.

I can totally understand that changing the colors in post is much easier.
However if you want to get the best video, these color transformations have to happen before the encoding of the video into a very lossy format. (And since the camera can only write a relatively slow data stream to the card, it has to be very lossy.)

That means for this camera, the picture profile is the only chance of doing so before the encoding (and setting the correct white-balance).

Most of the time, I'm only nudging the contrast and saturation in post.  Sometimes the exposure.

This video I didn't know the mood I wanted until I got to the editing.  

FOUND IT.

The distortion is coming from the preset I used to get halfway there.  

If I do the exact same settings manually, it doesn't make that distortion.

Something in the way that preset is altering the file.  Looks like four of the colour profiles/presets in filmora do that to one colour or another.

Well, I can do it manually easy enough, I was just trying to save some time with the preset.  I should know that 'saving time' never works.

...

But it's interesting that way the colours get the square edge.  It's like pixilation but worse.  Not something I see much in still photography.  
I feel like I want to spend 57 hours learning more about it.

But I also feel that today is the last day to bake gingerbread for the Holiday Feast so I really should ignore the squirrel and since I understand how to fix, I don't really need to know how it went wrong.